SIGCSE 2020 Pre-Symposium Event by the SIGCSE Committee on Computing Education in Liberal Arts Colleges
Contributed by Ameet Soni, soni@cs.swarthmore.edu
Are you willing to facilitate this discussion? Yes
Are there any others whom you would recommend as potential facilitators for this topic? Kevin Webb (Swarthmore), Sorelle Friedler and Sara Mathieson (Haverford). However, I am not sure if they are attending the workshop.
There has been an accelerated shift in the influence of computing technology and the use of algorithms in our daily lives. With this technology comes serious ethical questions relating to issues such as fairness and discrimination, accessibility, privacy, security, among others. Students are increasingly concerned about rapidly shifting norms and the impacts it will have on society. Particularly, they desire a better understanding of their role as future developers of these technologies. While many large institutions have added stand-alone ethics courses, this is difficult for liberal arts colleges under enrollment pressures. What are effective strategies for incorporating ethical thinking into the curriculum under these existing constraints? One option, similar to the Harvard Embedded EthiCS program, is to incorporate a module on ethics or computing for social good into each course in the CS curriculum. In addition, departments could establish partnerships with other departments (e.g., Philosophy) to introduce technological topics into their existing curriculum.